http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
QUEMOY AND MATSU. By now the names of those little islands off the Chinese coast may be
embedded so deeply in historical memory that it takes some dredging up to recall that they were
once the stuff of daily headlines and ominous forebodings of war.

Back in the furious Fifties, those sandbagged spits of land were being shelled daily by the
Communists in control of the Chinese mainland, and the question kept arising at presidential press
conferences: What does the United States propose to do about it?

Surely even now, somewhere in the stacks and carrels of a university library, some earnest student
of modern American diplomatic history, poor confused thing, is still trying to figure out the
Eisenhower administration's policy toward Red China's every aggressive move back then.

But our student needn't bother cranking his way through old microfilm trying to follow Ike's every
cryptic comment on the subject. All he has to do is pick up the paper and read George W. Bush's.
The more things have changed, the more mysterious presidential pronouncements remain.

There were at least two schools of thought to explain the habitual obscurity into which Ike would
sink in his public statements -- only to emerge at the end beaming like an underwater swimmer
who'd just crossed the English Channel without taking a breath. (It may have been Melville who said
a smile was the wisest response to some things.)

The first, superficial explanation for Ike's wordfog -- an explanation much favored by what passed
for the American intelligentsia at the time -- was that it couldn't be helped: Ike was just an amiable
duffer with dyslexic propensities.

A dissenting view was offered by the late Murray Kempton, a columnist whose small but lovely
niche in the pantheon of American opinionation now remains unfilled. It was Mr. Kempton's theory
that Ike was inarticulate like a fox. He argued that the old general's obscure responses to pressing
questions were deliberately designed to leave them nicely unanswered. (Ike hadn't spent all those
years as a staff officer without learning the dangers of clarity.)

Mr. Kempton sold me on his theory, especially after I heard a story about Ike and his press
secretary, Jim Hagerty. It was Mr. Hagerty's thankless job to translate his boss' remarks into
something that would approach English. And the press aide was particularly nervous just before one
news conference -- at which questions about Quemoy and Matsu were sure to fill the air, much like
the shells then falling on the islands themselves. One careless remark, he knew, and we might be at
war. "Don't worry, Jim,'' Ike soothed. "I'll just go out there and confuse 'em.'' And he did. No one
was better at it.

Before it became clear just what the United States would do if the Chinese invaded those islands (it
still isn't) the crisis had faded. Ike had laid down so much wordsmoke that there was nothing to fight
about. Here was an example not so much of peace through strength, but peace through confusion.

Historians really ought to pay as much attention to the origins of peace as they do to the origins of
war. If they did, they might see that, with only a verbal expenditure, Ike had bought time, and time
had brought peace, or at least an absence of war.

It was left to Murray Kempton, whose own convoluted 18th Century sentences wrapped around
the reader like an anaconda, to appreciate Ike's achievement. Eisehowerean may have been an
obscure tongue, but it proved a mighty useful one on occasion. Bushean, too, may have its uses.

There are times when the object of presidential statements is not to clarify the issues but to mystify
the adversary. The crafty old general did it deliberately. Our still new president may do it
accidentally. Either way can work.

Note that, after George W. Bush finished explaining his administration's China policy last week, and
assorted advisers finished explaining his explanation, said policy was at least as mysterious as it had
been before. And it had the added benefit of allowing all the analysts to read whatever they wanted
into it. The hawks at The Wall Street Journal were delighted, the doves in Congress were assured
nothing had changed, and all were scratching their heads.

Just what had W. said? In the course of a long day, he said he was ready to do "whatever it took
to help Taiwan defend herself,'' although military force was only "an option,'' and while the United
States still recognized only "one China,'' that he hoped peace would be maintained between "the
two nations,'' and our policy remained unchanged, whatever it was. Got that? Ike would have been
proud. And they say the Chinese are inscrutable.

Whether the president confused the Chinese, he certainly succeeded in confusing Congress: Tom Lantos, the Democratic congressman from California, sounded gratified. "I think the
president's straightforward, courageous and unambiguous statement,'' he said, by which he seems to
have meant the president's convoluted, cautious and ambiguous statement, "will guarantee that
hostilities in the Taiwan Strait will not take place.''

But Gary Ackerman, a Democratic congressman from New York, said he feared the country had
moved from "strategic ambiguity to strategic confusion.'' Apparently he was for ambiguity and
against confusion. Happily, he didn't try to explain the difference in this case.

The congressman from New York did ask a lot of questions. For example: "What does 'whatever
it takes' mean?'' But if all his questions had been answered forthrightly, it would mean the end of the
ambiguity he so treasures.

The case for ambiguity as a way to deter aggression is, well, ambiguous. The great powers of
Europe were so ambiguous about their intentions in 1914 that the world has yet to completely
recover from the result of their dangerously vague diplomacy.

Closer to our own time, an American secretary of state announced in 1949 that South Korea lay
outside the American "defensive perimeter.'' Naturally the Communists invaded the next year.

In 2001, there must be no doubt about this country's willingness to use force, and enough of it, to
defend the real Republic of China, the one on Taiwan.

But as for diplomatic conundrums like whether there are one or more Chinas, there's no need to go
into provocative detail. Or to play into the stereotype of the Western imperialist looking for a fight.
Time is on our side. Let's stretch it out, and fill the years talking cryptically.

When practiced right, ambiguity ought to be deliberate, not accidental. A science, not a lapse. Call it
a policy of unambiguous ambiguity. A recognition, as on certain old maps, that Here There Be
Sea Monsters. Why go there needlessly? Better to circumnavigate the more abstract issues. Clear
enough?